


we all spend a little while going down the rabbit hole

by curtaincall



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-05
Updated: 2014-02-05
Packaged: 2018-01-11 06:04:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1169575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curtaincall/pseuds/curtaincall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Troy is gone, and Abed is sinking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we all spend a little while going down the rabbit hole

Troy was gone.

Troy had been gone for weeks now, three weeks, twenty-one days, five hundred and four hours, thirty thousand two hundred and forty minutes, and no matter how many ways he tabulated it each one of those thirty thousand two hundred and forty minutes felt like a thousand years.

He was drowning, drowning in solitude, drowning in a mud puddle of abandonment and despair and special drink that tasted wrong, somehow.

He didn’t want to leave the blanket fort. He never wanted to leave the fort, in the usual run of things, because that was where the television was, was where safety and happiness was. But now that haven had morphed into a prison, and he no longer failed to get out of bed because he was tired but because he could not bear to face the world outside.

He was dreaming more often now, more vividly than he’d ever dreamed before, and he would find himself awake in the dark reaches of the night with tears on his cheeks, and be unable to remember how they got there.

He tried to watch TV, tried to watch movies, tried to read, but his attention span had crumbled. Guilty pleasures didn’t do it, auteur cinema didn’t do it, Cougar Town didn’t do it, Star Wars didn’t do it, Inspector Spacetime didn’t do it. Episode after episode, queued up on Netflix, put in his DVD player, playing out on the screen in a melee of light and color, and all he wanted to do was sleep.

So he slept, slept the days away, but eventually he had to wake, and eventually his body would allow him to sleep no more.

He pared his routine down to the essentials: no more classes, no more study group meetings. Just the bathroom and the kitchen, and neither very often. He was hungry, but eating was a waste of time.

They came and visited, talked to him from outside the curtains, his friends did, and if he had been working normally he would have taken this as a reminder that Troy was not all there was, that he had other people, other connections, other hopes, other dreams to look forward to. But he ignored the talking, ignored the phone calls, ignored the bowls of buttered noodles left outside.

And then, after three weeks, he got a letter.

It was slid under the edge of the blankets, so quietly he didn’t notice until what must have been hours later, when in the quiet of the day he woke up.

“Dear Abed, I miss you, and I’m worried about you. I’m sitting outside the fort, and it would make me feel better if you could write back to me just so I know you’re doing all right. You don’t have to come out, but I just want to make sure you know I care about you. Love, Annie.”

He stared at it for a minute, then turned back to his bed and hit the covers again. Why bother? He wasn’t coming out, wasn’t getting better, wasn’t getting Troy back, wasn’t even enjoying TV. He didn’t even have the energy to figure out which trope this was, exactly.

Some version of bereavement.

So he ignored the letter, and stared into space for a little while and thought about nothing.

After a while, her voice came from outside. “Okay, Abed, I’m getting up to go to the bathroom now. I’ll be back in a little bit.”

And he heard her walk away.

He wondered what she was doing out there. Did she have a book to read? He wasn’t hearing pages turn. Maybe she was studying, or texting Britta. Or maybe she’d taken up knitting.

“I’m back,” came her voice, a minute later, “and I’d really love it if you could write to me. Please. I’ll leave you alone once you do.”

He didn’t do anything. Because to write would have been to act, and all he wanted was simply to cease to exist, to fade away into his blankets and posters and action figures, so that there would be no memory that Abed Nadir had ever existed, had ever loved and lost and striven and fallen, had ever dared allow himself to join in the puppet-dance of humanity, had ever gotten involved with the world at all.

He had become a spectator with nothing to watch, a viewer staring at a blank screen. And his tragedy was that he had the power to turn it on, but to do so he must make the camera face himself.

And that was far too much to bear.

And without knowing what had happened he was sobbing, he was curled up on the floor of the fort, he was a helpless child longing for his mother, he was a shaking wreck of all that he had ever been.

And then he felt hands upon his cold hands, arms around his convulsed waist, felt a cheek warm and soft against his own.

“I’m sorry, Abed, I know I said I’d leave you alone, but I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear to watch you like this. I’m here for you. You have to know that. I’m here for you.”

He pushed her away, shoved her out, the muscles taut within his thin arms, and when he raised his tear-stained eyes to her own he saw fear and hurt and pity. And it was the hurt that made him break again, but the pity that stayed with him as he wailed.

And as she backed away he wondered whether this breach could ever mend.

  
  



End file.
